There’s some backstory to the current Rudy Giuliani drama I’d like to share.

After he left the mayoralty at the end of 2001 Giuliani made tens of millions of dollars on his reputation as “America’s Mayor” and a 9/11-based terrorism and security expert under the shingle Giuliani Partners. In the nature of things that rep was more valuable abroad than at home. He cashed in big time. That went on for about 15 years with a brief timeout for his failed 2008 presidential bid. He also had his own law firm Bracewell Giuliani, before leaving the firm to join Greenberg Traurig in 2016.

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An utterly remarkable story this morning in the Post. Reporters got hold of a series of retainer contracts that were being negotiated early this calendar year. It’s not clear whether they were finalized or money changed hands. But they involved Rudy Giuliani agreeing to represent the former top prosecutor in Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko, both as an individual and in his role as top prosecutor for combined sums of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just so we’re clear, this is the guy who he was working with to manufacture damaging information about the Biden family.

Happy Wednesday, November 27. President Donald Trump was briefed about the whistleblower complaint just before he unfroze military aid for Ukraine. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.

We’ve known for months that Rudy Giuliani held some of his Ukraine-related meetings in Spain. What wasn’t clear was what client or work had brought him to Spain in the first place. The Post reports this morning that he was staying at the Spanish estate of a Venezuelan energy magnate facing a money laundering and bribery probe in the US. There’s not anything illegal or even inappropriate about this in itself. But it underscores a clear pattern: Most of Giuliani’s business of late has been has been finding foreign oligarchs and plutocrats with legal trouble in the United States and getting paid to use his connection to Trump and the DOJ to get them off the hook.

Here are a few interesting data points from the just-released CNN poll on impeachment. The topline is pretty bad for the President. 50% of Americans believe the President should be impeached and removed from office. 43% disagree. Slightly more encouraging for the President is that those are the exact numbers CNN/SSRS found in mid-late October, prior to the public hearings. The President’s approval stands at 42% with 54% disapproving. In other words, the numbers are bad. But the hearings didn’t move anyone. We can also note that his approval is basically identical to the number who oppose removal from office. It’s like perfect polarization. You either support President Trump or you think he should be removed from office.

Happy Tuesday, November 26. A federal judge ruled Monday that President Donald Trump does not have the power to stop former White House counsel Don McGahn from obeying a House subpoena. Here’s more on that and the other stories we’re watching.

A quick rundown on a couple of important court actions within the last hour:

Before any more time goes by, I wanted to flag your attention to the November 8th Inside Briefing we did with foreign policy expert Heather Hurlburt on US relations with Turkey. US-Turkey relations may seem pretty far afield right now as we wrestle with the impeachment story. But it’s not. The whole briefing is illuminating. But I am suggesting you watch specifically for the part of the discussion where we get into how Trump’s actions and inactions toward Turkey have been shaped Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom have been lathered up with vast sums of money by cronies of President Erdogan for the purpose of gaining access to and influence over the President. Giuliani appears to have played a critical role portraying the Kurds to Trump as duplicitous and anti-Trump.

This tells us a lot about Trump’s actions toward Turkey. More important is that this looks like the template for current US relations with numerous countries around the world, especially those with authoritarian and oligarchic states where the strongman figure has access, either directly or indirectly, to large sums of private money.

Thank you again for being an Inside member.

Along with Josh Kovensky’s big scoop about Trump world lawyer Bud Cummins and the SDNY, there’s been a flurry of news over the last 48 hours about the tangle of corruption connecting Trump and Ukraine, largely but not exclusively through Rudy Giuliani. Most of these stories – and the criminal or semi-criminal networks they’re about – get hard to follow: Ten names you haven’t heard of involved in a corrupt enterprise in a country where corruption is endemic and commonplace. This tends to obscure the real pattern which is most important from a US perspective.

Let me try to explain what that is.

Happy Monday, November 25. It feels like every day, more subplots connected to the Ukraine pressure campaign come into focus. Today is no exception. Here’s what we’re watching.